The Hebrew inscription has a German auxiliary, where we read the following:

deeply mourned
by his wife and his son

A very simple biographical actionable statement: that Menachem's wife was at his death still alive and that he had only one son, no further children.

Of course we wanted to know who the wife and who was the son, especially since nothing is so well known over Menachem / Emanuel Mendel Birnbaum. We started to look for and were, at least in son quickly found:

Because of not mentioned by name in the grave inscription of the father son is none other than the journalist and most active

The picture shows Dr. Nathan Birnbaum (right) and Hillel Zeitlin, Zeitlin, 1871/72 in Korma, Mogilev Governorate, Russian Empire was born, was Hebrew and Yiddish writer. At the age of 71 years he was in 1942, and its almost entire family (only son Aaron survived) in the Warsaw ghetto murdered (Shoah victims), In the hands of the Zohar, wrapped in tallit and tefillin scale.

The couple Dr. Nathan Birnbaum and Rosa grain material had three sons:

Menachem Birnbaum, Born March 13, 1893 in Vienna, Jewish book artist, portraitist and book illustrator, as his wife Ernestine / Tina (Esther), born Helfmann and his two children Rafael Zvi and Chana murdered in 1945 (in AuschwitzShoah victims)

Uriel Birnbaum, Born November 13, 1894 in Vienna, painter and writer, d. 09 December 1956 in Amersfoort (NL). The high points of his work called the Moses cycle, the original pictures are unfortunately lost count. In the auditorium of our museum but all 50 images of the cycle reproduced issued:

Uriel Birnbaum, Moses cycle, Figure 1

Uriel Birnbaum, Moses cycle, Figure 2

Uriel Birnbaum, Moses cycle, Figure 3

Uriel Birnbaum, Moses cycle, Figure 4

Uriel Birnbaum, Moses cycle, Figure 5

Uriel Birnbaum, Moses cycle, Figure 6

Uriel Birnbaum, Moses cycle, Figure 7

Uriel Birnbaum, Moses cycle, Figure 8

Uriel Birnbaum, Moses cycle, Figure 9

Uriel Birnbaum, Moses cycle, Figure 10

Uriel Birnbaum, Moses cycle, Figure 11

Uriel Birnbaum, Moses cycle, Figure 12

Uriel Birnbaum, Moses cycle, Figure 13

Uriel Birnbaum, Moses cycle, Figure 14

Uriel Birnbaum, Moses cycle, Figure 15

Uriel Birnbaum, Moses cycle, Figure 16

Uriel Birnbaum, Moses cycle, Figure 17

Uriel Birnbaum, Moses cycle, Figure 18

Uriel Birnbaum, Moses cycle, Figure 19

Uriel Birnbaum, Moses cycle, Figure 20

Uriel Birnbaum, Moses cycle, Figure 21

Uriel Birnbaum, Moses cycle, Photo 22

Uriel Birnbaum, Moses cycle, Figure 23

Uriel Birnbaum, Moses cycle, Figure 24

Uriel Birnbaum, Moses cycle, Figure 25

Uriel Birnbaum, Moses cycle, Photo 26

Uriel Birnbaum, Moses cycle, Photo 27

Uriel Birnbaum, Moses cycle, Photo 28

Uriel Birnbaum, Moses cycle, Photo 29

Uriel Birnbaum, Moses cycle, Photo 30

Uriel Birnbaum, Moses cycle, Photo 31

Uriel Birnbaum, Moses cycle, Photo 32

Uriel Birnbaum, Moses cycle, Photo 33

Uriel Birnbaum, Moses cycle, Figure 34

Uriel Birnbaum, Moses cycle, Figure 35

Uriel Birnbaum, Moses cycle, Figure 36

Uriel Birnbaum, Moses cycle, Figure 37

Uriel Birnbaum, Moses cycle, Photo 38

Uriel Birnbaum, Moses cycle, Photo 39

Uriel Birnbaum, Moses cycle, Photo 40

Uriel Birnbaum, Moses cycle, Figure 41

Uriel Birnbaum, Moses cycle, Figure 42

Uriel Birnbaum, Moses cycle, Photo 43

Uriel Birnbaum, Moses cycle, Figure 44

Uriel Birnbaum, Moses cycle, Figure 45

Uriel Birnbaum, Moses cycle, Figure 46

Uriel Birnbaum, Moses cycle, Photo 47

Uriel Birnbaum, Moses cycle, Photo 48

Uriel Birnbaum, Moses cycle, Photo 49

Uriel Birnbaum, Moses cycle, Figure 50

Swell:

Klaus Dethloff, Theodor Herzl or the Moses of the fin de siècle, Vienna 1986, 60.

5 Kommentare

My cousin Mirjam Birnbaum, Uriel’s daughter, told me that the originals of “Moses” were bought by a rich man in Vienna and were in his villa there. When the Nazis took over Austria, the owner fled. The house was occupied by a very senior Nazi (SS) officer, who presumably threw the pictures out, as “decadent Jewish art”.

My uncle Uriel Birnbaum was indeed self-taught. He did all his art work on paper, or as lithographs: with coloured inks, coloured and “black-and-white” lithographs (e.g. “Das Buch Jonah”), black ink on paper, both coloured and plain pencils.

About half of the originals of the 50 “Der Kaiser und der Architekt” pictures are in the Albertina in Vienna, also a series of figurative pencil drawings . Copies of both of the books of 50 plates “Moses” and “Der Kaiser und der Architekt” are sometimes available on the internet. The Juedische Museum in Vienna has a horrifying series of drawings in coloured pencils of his terrible experiences on the Eastern Front in WW1, and his original pen-and-ink drawings for his book “In Gottes Krieg” sometimes appear for auction (we have a few of them). Many other books contain his drawings, including “Der Seelen-Spiegel: 120 Grotesken (also sometimes available on the internet).

Mirjam told me that he considered his writings much more important than his artistic work. He wrote books, articles in periodicals (e.g Aristo-), and many thousands of poems (about 1000 of them in “Gedichte, eine Auswahl”). Many original drafts of these works are in the Nationalbibliothek in Vienna, as well as elsewhere (including in our Archives).

Hello. Shabbat shalom. My name is Olga Keshelman-Kalashnikov, I live in Israel and am interested in the history of Zionism. Therefore I studied the biography of your grandfather Nathan. I know that he is buried in Scheveningen with your grandmother Rosa, but I can’t find photos of the grave and geographical coordinates. Could you help me with this?

I am a son of Solomon/Salomo Birnbaum, the grandson of Nathan Birnbaum, and great-grandson of Menachem Mendel Birnbaum (and also a direct descendent of Rabbi Meier Eisenstadt), and Director of the Nathan and Solomon Birnbaum Archives in Toronto. I recently came across Koschere Melange, and must congratulate you on the vast amount of research you are doing with regard to the inscriptions on the gravestones – including the Währinger Friedhof (and the one in Eisenstadt). (My grandmother is buried in the Zentralfriedhof, Vienna).

I have listed below a few corrections (and additions) to your articles on the Währinger Friedhof, I hope you can arrange for the corrections to be made to the blogs themselves.

• p.1. The Birnbaum family in Toronto arranged for the gravestone to be raised, repaired and repainted in 2004 – that is why it is so legible. I have been told that it’s the only gravestone in that cemetery that has been restored.
• p. 2. Marie (not Maria) Seelenfreund – but she was generally known by her Jewish name which was Miriam.
• p.3. “Nathan Birnbaum, der vor allem unter der Pseudonym Mathias Acher wirkte ….” Nathan B. did not use the pseudonym Mathias Acher all his life – only from about 1898 to about 1912, and during that time he quite often signed with his own name.
• p.4. “Anerkennung des Jiddischen als Einheits und Weltsprache”. Some people at the Czernowitz (spelling) Conference wanted to designate Yiddish as “the ethno-national Jewish language”. Nathan B. did not agree with this, and as a compromise it was finally decided to call it “an ethno-national Jewish language”.
• p.4. My father Dr. Solomon/Salomo A. Birnbaum died in 1989 (not1889) and is buried in Toronto, Canada (not New York).
• p.4. In addition to his pioneering work in Yiddish and Yiddish linguistics – which he taught at Hamburg University, later at London University – he was the pioneer of Hebrew palaeography, which he also taught in London University. He wrote the first properly organized Yiddish Grammar in 1915 while in the Austrian army at the battle-front.
• p.5. “Menachem Birnbaum”: This sentence seems to imply that Menachem Birnbaum and all his family were murdered in 1945 in Auschwitz. He was murdered there (or on the “death march” from there in early 1945). But his family had died long before – we don’t know where, perhaps in Auschwitz, perhaps at another death camp.
• p.5. “Uriel Birnbaum’s Moses Zyklus”: Another zyklus of 50 paintings – even more well-known – was Der Kaiser und der Architekt. His daughter Miriam told me that she thought that this Zyklus was even better than Moses.

Dear John,
Thanks for the interesting blog article.
Too bad the original images of the Moses cycle of Uriel Birnbaum are missing.
How fortunate that there are reproductions in the museum.
Me as an artist would be interested in that painting or printing technique Uriel Birnbaum has applied to the images of Moses cycle.
As far as I could investigate, he was self-taught and mainly painted with ink on paper and produced color lithographs.